


a vertebra to the discredit of those loves

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ableism, Abuse, Consent Issues, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mind Control, uhhhhh I DON'T KNOW THIS IS JUST A PRETTY TERRIBLE FIC, vriska warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-22
Updated: 2012-06-22
Packaged: 2017-11-08 07:25:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/440680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No way," said Vriska. "Only you can save me now, Fussyfangs!" She struck a pose,  head back, hip turned out, bending back on one heel. Her hand in the small of her back splayed like an Earth fish, one of the ones with stomachs for mouths.</p>
<p>"How enticing," Kanaya said. "No."</p>
            </blockquote>





	a vertebra to the discredit of those loves

In the end they were all alive again, or dead anew; they were older than anyone could remember being, and Kanaya shed light like a molting animal, left rooms full of abandoned brilliance. Rose combed her skin with bare fingers and watched light peel away. 

They had a house on the edge of the universe, which rose taller than the sun. Jade observed that, to be experiencing day and night as they were, the top of the tower must be traveling in unimaginable ways through the void. She drew spirals with Eridan on the wall, like sea change.

But there were days, and one day Vriska decided to pursue redemption.

She came to Kanaya in the morning, when the green of the sun was still shallow on the walls. "I need help," she announced, with green licking her face like war. Kanaya thought how nice she would look in a gold dress like the one she had died in; her skin a fragile continuum from sand to sky. She reminded herself that her vascular pump and aesthetic expertise now belonged to Rose, who was much more deserving of both, in an irritating sort of way. It helped that she could still taste Rose on the wet inside of her cheek. (In a manner mature and sexy, not carnivorous; although, admittedly, one wouldn't know it by the ppm of salt.)

"Someone else's help," she suggested to Vriska, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She sat in a soft chair with her face to the window in the place where Rose had sat a few hours before. 

"No way," said Vriska. "Only you can save me now, Fussyfangs!" She struck a pose,  head back, hip turned out, bending back on one heel. Her hand in the small of her back splayed like an Earth fish, one of the ones with stomachs for mouths.

"How enticing," Kanaya said. "No."

Vriska straightened. She had hair in her eyes from undue cranial tossing. She shrugged. "Okay," she said. "No big deal! Lol. I'll just go find Tavros and tell _him_ how sorry I am."

Kanaya stared at her hard. "Is it possible that when the universe brought you back from the endless void it forgot your brain," she said aloud. "Or did it perhaps search, futilely, among the many mouths of the abyss, before resigning itself to the hollow sound made by the thrashing of your tongue inside your pan?"

"Gee, Kanaya, did you just call me a _belle_?" said Vriska, and beamed. Her teeth hung like ice under the eave of her upward-curling lip. 

"For god's sake," Kanaya said. She had a book in her lap, which she had not been reading; she closed it. It made a dull clap between her hands. Vriska leaned forward and tried to take it from her, but of the two of them Kanaya had always been the stronger corpse. She flung it to the floor, and stood, and saw Vriska's fists go slack at her sides.

"Tavros doesn't want to see you," she told her, liking the way Vriska's thumbs folded in against her flat palms at the words. "Tavros is not interested in your self-serving apologies. Now, why don't you run along and cry to John-- if he can remember your name today--"

"Hot stuff from a girl who sawed off the guy's legs midsnooze," said Vriska, breathlessly. Her face was excessively close. Kanaya frowned at it.

"I feel sure I never judiciously detached a hair on John's head," she began. "For one thing, Rose would have--"

"I meant Tavros, you dumbfuck!" 

"Oh," said Kanaya. "Right. That."

"'Oh, right,'" Vriska said, in an unflattering voice which Kanaya supposed was meant to mimic her own deliberate diction. "Who feels the crushing weight of sweeps old guilt now, huh?"

"You, I suspect," said Kanaya. Severing Tavros' useless limbs from his torso had been less satisfying than she'd expected, now that she thought about it: messy, of course, and effortful, the familiar flesh more resistant to her chainsaw's stroke than the crackable hide of the imps. She remembered the jolt that had run up her arms when she reached his withered spine.

Vriska sneered, and shoved her back. Her nose crumpled between her narrow eyes. Kanaya wanted, with unexpected urgency, to kiss the high bridge, the place where bone gathered behind cartilage. There was a blood vessel in Vriska's eyelid, greenish through layers of skin, and Kanaya imagined peeling back the flesh from the sevenfold stare, imagined sinking one slim tooth into that fragile gush. Vriska would have to hold so still.

"What?" Vriska demanded. "Have I got something in my eye?"

In the centermost pupil of the bunch Kanaya could see her own face: bright as a surgeonocide's operating lamp. "Yeah," said Kanaya, and Vriska blinked, twice, rapid as little wings, and as pluckable. The curve of her naked eye under her shuttering lids, like a sun. 

"You can talk to him for me," Vriska was saying, wheedling now, leaning forward so that Kanaya almost fell back into her seat to escape the old-popcorn stink of her breath. "It's like you said, the little jerk doesn't care that you brutally mangled his snoring body, so it's not like it'll be awkward. Five minutes of your fucking time, is that so much to--"

Kanaya grabbed her by the shirtfront and pressed her mouth to the side of Vriska's neck. She felt Vriska pause: felt Vriska's arms come up to frame her hips, Vriska's hands settling on the padded arms of her abandoned chair. She kept her tongue behind her fangs and did not attempt breath. Her lips, she knew, were a cool ring against Vriska's blind throat.

Vriska breathed in. Her neck expanded to make room for the passage of air. Kanaya lifted her head, delicately, and licked her lips, and looked to see if she had made an impression. 

"Okay," she said.

"Wait, really?" said Vriska. On her neck the long green trace of Kanaya's make-up moved, riding hopeful muscle. 

"I said, okay," said Kanaya. She licked her lips again, seeking salt.

 

Of course, it was easier threatened than done.

All interpersonal concerns and splatter heavy history aside, the others could be quite hard to find, unless one literally owned a ball of golden yard which would guide one right to them. Kanaya sometimes went for days without seeing a sign of any dead or living thing save for the writing on the walls. And Tavros had always been shy, possibly because his last desperate nod towards extroversion had ended with more than merely social paralysis. 

In the end she was lucky; he was with Dave, who could be detected a mile off by the Doritos dust. They were playing Scrabble in one of the empty rooms on the ground floor.

"Tavros," she said, "can I speak with you?"

Tavros looked up from his tiles. He had ludicrously brown eyes now, each iris blood-stuffed and the golden slice of sclera shot through with muddy veins. "Uh," he said, "yes?"

"I mean," said Kanaya, "privately."

Dave's head turned. His shades made it difficult to determine where he was looking, or if he was looking at all. It was sometimes possible to see his eyes through the glass, Kanaya knew, but in her presence they went opaquely bright. 

"Sup?" he said. He was playing with his tile holder as if it were a game controller; the letters slid with the tilt of the wood, lining up against his fingertips. It was strange to see them partaking of any activity that did not involve small ensphered animals or the inept touching of robot junk, but then she supposed that even they must sometimes desire roughage in the diet of their days.

The board read, in indeterminate order: "SICK", "DISMOUNT", and "BRO".

"It's about Vriska," she said. On her way down she had considered a number of approaches, several subtle and all ingenious, but she had neglected to account for the fact of Tavros Nitram, ageless and twice dead and still unpitiably young. He wore his crest of spiky hair longer these days: it flopped unruly down the middle of his forehead, like a line of trees dividing sand from stone. 

"Well then it can't be that important," said Dave, "why don't you come back when I'm done pummeling his illiterate ass with bullets made of pure sesquip."

Kanaya looked at Tavros. Tavros looked uncomfortable. Dave took his shades off and folded them up and set them on the table. Kanaya was always surprised by how small his features looked in his face without his sunglasses; the vast expanse of his skin. 

"I'll be right back," Tavros said, finally, to Dave. He rose, clanking. He had new robolegs: they were shaggier with metal than the ones he wore on the meteor, improvements and stopgaps crammed bristling into a steel frame. Or perhaps the intricate externals had been added merely for effect. It was hard to tell, with Jade. 

Tavros followed her into the hall. "Hi, by the way," he said, moving as though to put his hands in his pockets before realizing he was naked below the waist, if also nonexistent. 

"Hello," said Kanaya. "I like your jacket." Which was in fact true.

"Okay," said Tavros. "I mean, thank you. Only, is this really a conversation, which requires upper body garment compliments, uh, as word lubricant? Because if so I think we should find a room with, perhaps, a resting slab, or two." 

"It's not-- never mind," said Kanaya. She crossed her arms and then uncrossed them. "Vriska wants you to forgive her," she said. Somehow the words were not what they had been, when said aloud in an open-ended sandstone hall where sunlight painted their ceiling to be the color of apples, and the shadows were cypress-green, and Tavros had wet Doritos dust on the tip of one ear. She plowed on anyway. "Declare all debts between you done. Give her the absolution she so needily craves. Because she's, and I regretfully quote: _soooooooo_ sorry! Personally, I think you should--"

Tavros' brow furrowed.

"I already did," he said.

"What?" said Kanaya. "That's ridiculous. You--"

"I forgave her."

"You can't have," Kanaya said.

"No, I did. I said, Vriska, I used to like you a lot, back when I didn't really know you, at all, and now I know that you're kind of, a big douche, but in your head you probably think you mean well, so, uh, stay away from me and never try to contact me again, please. But also, don't get so down on yourself, because what a waste of all that authentic, excellent self esteem, and, I probably had it coming, whatever it actually is, since I think at this point that is certainly up for a vigorous, ontological debate."

Kanaya shook her head a little to get the commas out of her ears.

"You had nothing coming," she said, slowly. "You deserved nothing."

"Excuse me," said Tavros.

"Nothing Vriska did to you," Kanaya snapped. "You were a complete innocent who fell repeatedly prey to her grotesque delusions of histourism. How that has yet to penetrate your peaceful skull may be the greatest mystery paradox space has left in its shredded celestial womb."

"I'm glad that you have gotten to a point where you, uh, feel okay, referencing reproductive organs, in conversation," said Tavros. "But, uh, I was telling you what I told Vriska, not what I actually thought. I was sort of in a hurry."

"Because you would do anything to escape her vicious miasma," Kanaya prompted.

"Um," said Tavros, "no. Dave and I had a Fiduspawn appointment, at which, I thoroughly 'whupped' him, I should add, and have now, indeed, added. Look, there's Rose."

Kanaya mouthed this last comment to herself, trying to parse its place in the larger monologue; she was still working on it when Rose tapped her on the shoulder.

"Hello, Kanaya," said Rose. "You're looking dour."

"I am no such thing," said Kanaya. She was aware of a feeling like sand under her feet. She wondered how she could have missed the pure dissolution of so much righteous rage. There was a time when she would have given anything to steer Tavros into his present apathy, and now all that ambition was like ash on her palate.

Rose kissed her. It was sweet, and tongueless except for a slick touch to the corner of her mouth. At the edge of her eye she saw Tavros look away politely.

"Why are you here?" she asked, rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand.

"She's our third," Tavros said. His ears had tilted outward to cup air in the shadow of his horns. 

This conjured a series of mental images. Kanaya fought the urge to retch. 

"For Scrabble," said Rose kindly. "You didn't really think they were playing of their own accord, did you?"

And:

"I do know," said Tavros, out of nowhere. "What I'm responsible for, and what I'm not. It took a while, but I do." He shrugged and the movement rolled down his back.

Rose put her hands on Kanaya's shoulders. There was a scar on both sides of her neck, the hard tissue white as the eggsome glimmer of her sight organs. "Do you want to join us?" she asked, and pulled back her hood, a little self-consciously, the curve of her wrist careful and dear.

"That's very," said Kanaya, and, "no." She stepped away and the noise of her heel on stone was a crack, a shot, a snap of columnal bone.

 

While she loved Vriska she had dressed her in white. She made wings with tissue and the memory of Vriska's blood, and she made endless red shoes. It was all very  tender, though buried by sheets of cloth and stupid numerical codes. 

Vriska betrayed her, of course, in white and red and blue, in shitty spiderhems. She was a flighty broad and infatuated with the wounds she had dealt people, bloated with unkind pride. At the time she had done nothing worse to Kanaya than love her, and so could barely focus on her for two minutes at a time. But she paid attention to Tavros: he was her favorite ruin. The worst thing about watching her kiss him had been the perfect focus in her face, the sweep of her lowered lashes as they shuddered against her cheek. Vriska kissed her oldest victim like she could suck her own poisons out of him, like she could strip his shadow off the soles of his dangling feet. 

Vriska had never, in all that time, looked at Kanaya head on.

Kanaya didn't remember what Tavros looked like while he was in her arms. He had been wearing some stupid green thing, and his legs hung under him like branches heavy with fruit. Begging To Be Pruned, she might have said. She wished she had remembered bisecting him the first time Vriska brought it up: maybe then, maybe somehow, she wouldn't now be so surprised. 

 

"Well?" said Vriska, who was exactly where Kanaya had left her.

"What was the point of this?" said Kanaya. She had been hoping that she would sound tired, but to her dissatisfaction she only sounded mad. An occupational hazard, she supposed, of never sleeping. 

"Duhhhhhhhh," said Vriska, circling now. "The point was, get over it! Stop being so pissy and thinking about murder every time we hang out!"

Kanaya put a hesitant hand to her teeth. Vriska rolled her eyes.

"Come _on._ Bull boy did it, and so can you," she said. "There. A moral, straight from the mouth of Troll Aesop, complete with random beast involvement."

"Bull boy never wants to lay orbs on you again."

"Bull boy doesn't know what he's missing," said Vriska, and raised one knee, the better to rest her boot on the by-now cold armchair. The stretch of her thigh was diagonal under her skirt. "Anyway, he's happy now, right? All that work on my part and he's way happier than me. Of course he forgave me. He's got everything he could ever need."

"I think that there is not," said Kanaya, "an ending that can justify your means."

She was tired, after all. Some part of her. There was no possible world in which she was not.

"Whatever," said Vriska. "Are we going to make out now? What do I need to say? I don't think I need to tell you I love you, do you?"

Kanaya had once believed in the future as she believed in almost nothing but love. She had woken up in a less than fetching buttercup coon and stalked gilt streets under infinite skies. Skaia taught its sins with care: hubris, and envy, and truly execrable color schemes, and hope. She still missed it, when she was lying on a pile of torn out stuffing with a god wrapped around her back. She missed looking into an endless mirror and finding in it herself. She no longer had much use for her reflection. One day, maybe, it would creep back under the glass, gray and wan, freckled as a berry. Until then she had Rose, and bitterness; and pointless fear.

Everything she could ever need.

"No," she said. She put her hand on Vriska's nape to pull her close, and their breath would have mingled if it didn't still run in one long stream. 


End file.
